Pesticides, a Love Story: America’s Enduring Embrace of Dangerous Chemicals by Michelle Mart (review)

Michelle Mart asks a provocative question and then answers with evasions and non sequiturs. Some of the answers are diverting; some add to our knowledge. They do not cohere, however, into a unified, convincing, or novel argument. More’s the pity, since she has done a tremendous amount of research, surveying the literature and reading closely through important archival collections.

Why, Mart asks, a half-century after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (New York, 1962), are pesticides ubiquitous? A raft of books have documented America’s relationship with pesticides—what Mart calls a love story—and all count Carson’s book as a turning point. After the publication of Silent Spring, some of the most problematic pesticides were outlawed, but the agricultural system that requires chemicals remains. Older pesticides have been replaced with still-dismal effects, including the disruption of humans’ delicate hormonal systems and a reliance on genetically modified food.

Why this situation persists is less clear. Mart can be evasive: “Of course, there are different answers to this complex question,” she says at one point (p. 58). She does offer a variety of possible answers: that the benefits of pesticide use outweigh the risks, that the chemical-industrial complex shapes policy and perception, that pesticide use is driven by liberal goals to modernize the world, or that entrenched powers have proved too hard for those opposed to pesticides to dislodge.

Rather than investigate these possibilities, though, Mart offers other answers. She focuses on “the narrative about pesticides found in the public culture and, most especially, how it was shaped by the mainstream media” (p. 8). Mart tracks the media’s creation of a contemporary myth: that humans must control nature, that short-term thinking is preferable to long-term, that individual concerns trump collective ones, and that environmental decisions are to be based on what has already happened, not what might. These are the four pillars of what she calls a “cultural discourse” that had Americans confronting a series of acute pesticide crises with only minimal reforms and no radical attempts to disrupt the whole troubling agricultural system (p. 5).

Even on its own terms, this method could not answer the question Mart asks. To understand how discourse is made, one needs to examine the social and economic machinations of the players. In the last two decades, for example, Carson has been accused of killing millions of people by having gotten DDT banned. Mart notes this rhetoric, but she pays scant attention to how, as Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have shown, these ideas originated in corporate misinformation campaigns. Also for this method to work, one needs some account of how people in particular historical eras read, but Mart offers no such theory, instead substituting her own interpretation of the media reports for those of Americans in distant periods.

More confusing, this method disappears for extended stretches. Long sections consider twice-told tales of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s battles with other federal agencies, Carson’s writing of Silent Spring, and the growth of the National Audubon Society. Mart spends time on the Green Revolution and Agent Orange. The mainstream press recedes from these accounts—instead, Mart gives glimpses of the social and economic motivations behind the rhetoric. Occasionally the tangents are enlightening—scholars deeply invested in the history of pesticides may find some nuggets—but these do not add up to a full account.

For historians of the South, little here is of direct relevance. She touches briefly on a few southern matters, but mostly her focus is national or international. Pete Daniel does not cover all of these topics, but his books Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s (Chapel Hill, 2000) and Toxic Drift: Pesticides and Health in the Post–World War II South (Baton Rouge, 2005) explain the South’s relationship with pesticides in much fuller and...